Josip Vaništa was an outstanding figure of the Croatian neo-avantgarde movement and the founder of the famous artistic group Gorgona. In his untitled collage series, he evokes the Dadaist tradition of the collage, while by the use of Yugoslavian newspaper clippings he captures a piece of history in an archive-like manner. This series is the result of Vaništa’s work spanning over the decade of 1990 to 2000. Black and white photographs, headlines and fragments from the daily newspapers are impressions commenting on Croatian and Yugoslavian politics, social matters, and other concerns of the society at the time. The collages are a testimony of the turbulent times both in Croatia and the region: the cruel Balkan war and the painful process that eventually resulted in the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
Jan Elantkowski
